FTL travel brings planetary systems together but with the cost of Chaos that no machine can navigate. Only the elite pilots or tezars of the Choyan race can reliably helm a starship. Palaton is one such pilot. Other races of the Compact would—and have—done almost anything to learn their secret. Palaton faces that danger as well as the strife and upheaval of his own planet Cho. Caught in a power struggle, he faces the inevitable burnout of his ability. He will turn to a secret experiment with a young civilization hoping to gain its own place among the stars, a race which calls itself "human".